Remembering The Coffee Shop: A New York Institution Is Closing After 28 Years

The Coffee Shop, a New York City institution that also consistently made the list of 100 highest-grossing independent restaurants in the U.S., is closing its doors for good on Sunday. Getty

Restaurant closures in New York are about as common as openings. They happen on such a frequent basis that only the long-gone favorite haunts of the Manhattan elite—like the original Four Seasons, Le Cirque, Elaine’s, even Gino’s—receive proper obituaries.

The Coffee Shop, in New York's Union Square, was not in that league. Coffee Shop isn’t even Union Square Cafe, Danny Meyer's groundbreaking restaurant that was so essential to the city that losing its spot on the square it made famous wasn’t enough to close it for good.

But Coffee Shop is set to close its doors forever on Sunday, and is enough of a New York institution that its impending demise has provoked an outpouring of love on social media from fans and among food writers who begrudgingly admit that, while it was never going to earn any Michelin stars, it was something very special.

For the uninitiated: Coffee Shop is a Brazilian-American diner that sits on the corner of 16th street and Union Square West. Its red neon “Coffee Shop” sign is a holdover from the space’s previous tenant, an actual coffee shop called Chase. For much of its nearly 28 years of existence, it was open 23-7 (dark only between 7am and 8am), and what made it so fascinating was how accessible it became in spite of its celebrity-filled roots.

From left to right, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci and Julianne Moore pictured dining at Coffee Shop in 2007. Getty

But this A-list love aside, Coffee Shop has been a restaurant for the rest of us. Its burgers, sandwiches and salads sell in the $15 arena, and come with a heaping pile of addictive herb fries. Its relatively large footprint meant landing one of its 270 seats—once you got the attention of a host whose bedside manner was indifferent at best but whose beauty usually meant this was just a side gig—was relatively easy, even for the outdoor tables. And though in recent years the air conditioning was more of a frame of mind than a reality, it remained the place to go for everything from Sunday brunch and casual business lunches to evening drinks and dinners with friends and lovers.

“Everyone has a story about this place,” a bartender told me Wednesday night, joking that she’s heard enough to fill a coffee table book. “‘Oh, I met my husband here,’ to, ‘oh, I did ecstasy for the first time at that table!’”

My Coffee Shop story starts in 2007, on New Year’s Eve. My dining companion was a friend with an allergy to planning, particularly New Year’s Eve reservations, but Coffee Shop took us without one, and served us a chicken parm sandwich that hadn’t appeared on the menu before and hasn’t returned ever since. But it was precisely what the evening called for. In the ensuing years, Coffee Shop became, for me, a sort of culinary Room of Requirement. It’s been the solution for group dinners with picky eaters, a celebratory meal after a friend’s book launch, last-minute outdoor brunches, and post-yoga salad-and-people-watching sessions.

For nearly 30 years, serving those many occasions has added up to enormous success. According to Restaurant Business magazine’s 2017 ranking of the 100 highest-grossing independent restaurants in the U.S., Coffee Shop served 314,000 meals and pulled in an estimated $14.3 million in sales, good enough to land in the 79th spot on the list. Coffee Shop stands out as one of few non-steakhouses (there are 24, mostly in New York and Las Vegas) or bottle-service meccas (the Tao Group has five on the list) to crack the top 100, and to do so consistently for nearly two decades.

And yet, even this high level of sales wasn’t enough to inoculate the business from the rising cost of rent and wages in New York. Coffee Shop co-owner and president Charlies Milite told Forbes that rent had become “unusually high,” accounting for close to 27% of the restaurant’s gross revenues. Add in the scheduled $2-per-hour minimum wage hike set to take place on December 31—an increase that, across Coffee Shop’s 150 employees and multiple dayparts of service, would have added $46,000 to the monthly payroll—made it impossible to break even by cutting costs elsewhere.

“It’s a wakeup call for our industry in general,” Milite said. “When a restaurant is one of the top-ranked restaurants in America, sales-wise, and can no longer afford to operate, you have to look at that and say there’s a shifting paradigm in the business.”

Milite predicts that this shift will lead to the gradual disappearance of 200- and 300-seat restaurants like Coffee Shop; in their places will come eateries with smaller, more focused menus and limited service. He’s already trying this with Flats Fix, a fast-casual taqueria right next to Coffee Shop on 16th street. Its menu is significantly less complex than Coffee Shop’s, its footprint is smaller and it’s only open for 12 hours a day.

“When a restaurant is one of the top-ranked restaurants in America, sales-wise, and can no longer afford to operate, you have to look at that and say there’s a shifting paradigm in the business," says owner Charles Milite.
2002 Getty Images

The rest of us will have to stick to the script we follow when a beloved New York institution shuts down. We’ll complain about the chains that take their place (Coffee Shop is rumored to become a bank—a transition that would render its “Chase” doorway etching, leftover from the former coffee tenant, the ultimate irony), and we’ll grouse about the city policies that make it untenable for our Coffee Shops and Gino’s and Elaine’s to keep their doors open. We’ll post remembrances on social media, and we may even pour a last drink with a lump in our throat.

But we’ll also, Milite believes, get over it.

“I do think it’s going to leave a hole of some sort in Manhattan; I don’t know when there will be another. But then, there’s always the next one,” he said. “I’ve been joking with my friends that everyone is crying now but 30 days from now people will have moved on. That’s what we do in New York. In New York we move on. It’s a moving, changing city and there will be other things that come up and The Coffee Shop just be a great memory.”

Maggie McGrath is a staff writer at Forbes who is responsible for covering - and helping to oversee our coverage of - the food and drink industry. She edits the 30 Under 30 Food/Drink list, and helps program the Under 30 Summit and the AgTech Summit. She's worked at Forbes s...